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Friday, February 6, 2015

Examples of Christ-followers who contextualize their faith in real workplaces are extremely helpful. Last week, we looked at Jack van Hartesvelt, who made a conscious choice to apply what he was hearing on Sunday to the work he was doing on Monday as a hotel investment negotiator.

This week, I want to share another inspiring example: Don Flow, CEO of Flow Automotive. Flow runs a car sales and service company with 32 dealerships in the North Carolina area of the USA.

Most people don't put "Christianity" and "car sales" in the same sentence. For Don Flow, they cannot be separated. Living out the implications of his faith in the real world of automotive sales and service is where his drive comes from. Thinking through how his company could align policy and practice with the biblical worldview has made a dramatic difference in the way Flow Automotive sells and services cars.

"We don’t have the traditional run back and forth negotiating process; we have a pricing structure that’s set. You don’t have to be a tough negotiator, or more educated, to get a fair price. If you’ve got a Ph. D. or if you’re a janitor, you’ll pay the same price for the vehicle. We did a study and found that the people who typically paid the least for the cars were the most able to pay. Those least able to pay, paid the most. For me, it was wrong to take advantage of the least able."

"We want to be transparent to our customers. We share all of our information with them. In our appraisal process of a car, we go online together with the customer, pull up all the auction reports, Kelley Blue Book, NADA Black Book. We have kiosks in our showroom floors so people can go online. So we try to accommodate the customer at every step, in the way they’d like to buy a car. In our operating principle, the customer is in control of the process, and our job is to help the customer in that process."

Several years ago I heard Don Flow give a speech at Seattle Pacific University. I asked permission to edit his remarks, and I invite you to watch this 4-minute clip, to get a picture of how to align cars with a biblical worldview: